n January 1891, Victorien Sardou premiered his Thermidor at the Comédie Français. The play tells the story of a clerk working for the fearsome Committee for Public Safety who tries to save its victims from the Terror by misplacing their paperwork. The play’s title alludes to the day, 9 Thermidor, when the Committee’s sanguinary chairman, Maximilien Robespierre, was overthrown.
Thermidor’s first night was a great success. Nevertheless, when word circulated that Robespierre was portrayed as the play’s villain, everything changed. The second night’s audience was so abusive that the police were called. Faced with the possibility that more performances would be disrupted (but more likely for political reasons), the Carnot government promptly banned Thermidor. The matter did not end there, however. A few days later, two deputies questioned the government’s action during a session of the National Assembly, arguing that Thermidor’s treatment of the Revolution’s evil aspects did not justify banning. What started as a debate about artistic freedom, however, quickly changed direction when Georges Clemenceau rose to defend the Terror by calling it inseparable from the Revolution. “Gentlemen,” he said, “whether we want or not, whether it pleases us or shocks us, the French Revolution is a bloc . . . from which we can separate nothing.” L’affaire Thermidor, as it was called, illuminated the issue that had divided historians since the start of Revolution: were the events, as Clemenceau seemed to be saying, simply a case of “on ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs”? Or was it, as Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Hippolyte Taine argued, a disaster for France? Three new books make their own contributions to this perpetual debate.
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